Category: Behind the Stories

Craft notes, influences, and the making of Grimbard fiction.

  • Five Books That Taught Me to Be Afraid

    Five Books That Taught Me to Be Afraid

    I don’t know exactly when I became a horror person. I don’t think there was a single moment. There was a slope, and it started earlier than I usually admit.

    These are the books that built the slope.

    Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark — Alvin Schwartz

    I was probably too young for this book. That was the point.

    The stories in Scary Stories are short, sourced from actual American folklore, and they do not soften their endings. The heroine of one story peels her face off in the mirror. The man who thinks he’s been given a human head as a joke discovers he has. The book is not interested in teaching you that everything is okay.

    But what made it genuinely formative — what I only understood later — is that Schwartz sourced the material from actual folklore collections. Jan Harold Brunvand. Richard Dorson. The same folk horror researchers that serious academics cite. These stories weren’t invented; they were collected, shaped, and passed down through communities that needed them.

    The Stephen Gammell illustrations are a separate conversation. They are the most consistently disturbing illustrations in children’s publishing history and I will not accept pushback on this.

    Find it on Amazon (affiliate link)

    Goosebumps: Welcome to Dead House — R.L. Stine

    The first book in the original Goosebumps series, and still the one that works best as a horror novel rather than a scary-things-happen-to-kids novel.

    The family moves to a new town. The town is wrong. The kids who seem friendly are wrong. The house is wrong. The specific wrongness accumulates slowly through the first half of the book — Stine was genuinely good at this early, before the formula calcified — and by the time the reveal comes, the reader already knew something bad was true.

    What Welcome to Dead House taught me: the town as organism. The idea that a community could have a collective and malevolent purpose. That the neighbors’ friendliness might be a different kind of threat than their hostility.

    That’s folk horror logic, delivered to eight-year-olds.

    Find it on Amazon (affiliate link)

    In the Dark — Edited by Alberto Manguel

    This one doesn’t get cited enough.

    Manguel’s anthology collects ghost and horror stories with a genuine literary standard, and the result is a book that understands the difference between a story that scares you and a story that stays. M.R. James is here, doing what M.R. James does. Dickens is here, and the Dickens ghost story is better than anyone who knows Dickens from A Christmas Carol expects. There’s Borges, whose horror operates at the level of logic rather than event.

    What the anthology taught me: horror is not a thing that happens to characters. It is a quality of attention. The scariest stories in this collection barely have events. They have the sense that something is looking.

    The Haunting of Hill House — Shirley Jackson

    Probably the most technically accomplished horror novel in the American tradition, and the one that taught me the most about point of view as a horror device.

    Everything in Hill House is filtered through Eleanor’s perception, which is cracking from the first chapter in ways the reader can see but Eleanor can’t. By the time you reach the ending, you understand that the most frightening thing in the book isn’t the house. It’s the narrator.

    What it taught me: unreliability as horror. The idea that the monster might be the person telling you the story. That horror and interior damage are not separate categories but the same category from different angles.

    Every writer who works in psychological or atmospheric horror should read this book more than once.

    The Boxcar Children — Gertrude Chandler Warner

    I know. Hear me out.

    The Boxcar Children is not a horror novel. But it taught me something that ended up being essential to the horror I write, which is this: isolation plus community equals stakes.

    The Alden children are alone in the world. They have no parents, no safety net, and they’ve built everything they have from nothing in a disused boxcar in the woods. The stakes of their situation — the real possibility that it all goes wrong, that they’re genuinely without resources or protection — is what makes the resolution satisfying.

    Horror that works requires that the reader believe the threat is real and the characters have something to lose. I learned that early from four kids living in a boxcar, not from monsters. By the time I got to the monsters, I already understood that the anxiety underneath them had to be real.

    Find it on Amazon (affiliate link)

    What They Have in Common

    Rules. All five of them, in different ways, operate on rules. The rules of the house. The rules of the town. The rules of what a narrator is allowed to know. The rules of what happens when you break the wrong thing in the wrong place.

    I didn’t understand that when I was reading them. I was just scared. But the rules were there, doing the work, making the fear feel earned and real and anchored to something.

    That’s what I’m still trying to build.

    More folklore, creature features, and horror craft — join the Grimbard list.
    My own folklore horror: There Be Monsters: Then and Now

  • The Craft of “Don’t Do X”: Why Rules Are the Most Powerful Tool in Folk Horror

    The Craft of “Don’t Do X”: Why Rules Are the Most Powerful Tool in Folk Horror

    Three rules. That’s all the setup my story “Rabbit Season” needed.

    Bank the fire before you sleep.
    Don’t drink the spring water in May.
    Don’t shoot the white ones in winter.

    And underneath: DON’T BRING IT HOME. 1903.

    By the time a reader reaches the actual horror in that story, they’ve already done most of the work themselves. The rules told them something was out there. The rules implied a history of people who learned what they knew the hard way. And the rules established a logic — which means, in the reader’s mind, that violating them has consequences. The horror becomes almost secondary. The anticipation of violation does most of the damage.

    This is not an accident. Rules are the most powerful structural tool in folk horror, and I think about them more than almost anything else when I’m plotting.

    Why Rules Work

    The rule implies the failure.

    That’s it. That’s the whole mechanism. When you tell a reader “don’t open the door at midnight,” you have just created, in the reader’s imagination, a vivid image of someone opening the door at midnight. You’ve created the dread before the action. The rule functions as foreshadowing compressed into an imperative.

    What makes folk horror rules specifically effective — versus, say, rules in a haunted-house thriller — is that folk horror rules come attached to community. They were taught. Which means someone taught them for a reason. Which means someone, probably multiple someones, found out the hard way what happens when you don’t follow them.

    The rule is a compression of suffering. When a grandmother passes down “don’t look at the lights in the woods,” she is summarizing a trauma. The reader feels the weight of that compression even if they never see the original event. The rule carries the past with it.

    The Three Components of a Good Horror Rule

    After a lot of trial and error, I’ve landed on three things a horror rule needs to work.

    It has to be specific without explaining itself.

    “Don’t go into the woods at night” is weak. It’s too broad. It doesn’t have the texture of something real. “Don’t whistle after dark in October” is better. It’s specific enough to feel like it comes from somewhere — someone, at some point, whistled in October and received a consequence — but it doesn’t explain what. The specificity implies the knowledge. The silence implies the dread.

    It has to be possible to break.

    This sounds obvious but it’s the mistake most writers make. If the rule is impossible to violate in practice, it doesn’t generate tension. “Don’t fly to the moon” is a rule with no teeth in a contemporary setting. The rule has to be something a reasonable person could break under pressure, by accident, or because they don’t believe it. The more plausible the violation, the more the reader worries.

    It has to cost something visible when broken.

    The consequence doesn’t need to be immediate and it doesn’t need to be fully explained. But the reader has to sense that breaking the rule matters. This is often established through the rule itself — “don’t bring it home” implies that bringing something home has happened before and the result was bad enough that someone carved the warning into wood.

    The Rules Conversation as Exposition

    One technique I use repeatedly: the scene where an older character explains the rules to a younger one, and the younger one doesn’t fully believe them.

    This accomplishes three things simultaneously. It delivers the rules naturally, without the author simply listing them. It establishes the intergenerational structure of folk knowledge — the fact that someone who lived through the consequences is passing this down. And it creates dramatic irony: the reader understands the rules are real while watching the character who will eventually violate them dismiss them as superstition.

    The conversation also lets you calibrate the older character’s delivery. Are they frightened? Matter-of-fact? Resigned? The emotional register tells the reader how seriously to take the threat. The best folk horror rule deliveries are calm. Not dramatic. Not pleading. Calm and specific, the way you explain not to touch a hot stove — because the person explaining it has accepted that there’s no way to make someone understand until they’ve been burned, and they’re trying anyway.

    What Not to Do

    The mistake I see most often: explaining the rule.

    “Don’t open the cellar door because the thing in there will kill you” is not a rule. It’s a warning. It has already evacuated the mystery. The reader knows what’s in the cellar. The dread is gone.

    The rule should always know more than it says. The best rules feel like the summary of a longer story that the story itself never quite tells. You’re always building on implied history, never on explicit history.

    The second mistake: too many rules. If you have six rules in the first chapter, the reader can’t hold them all as live threats. Three is the traditional structure — it’s not arbitrary. Three is about the limit of what a reader can track simultaneously as specific sources of dread. If you need more, introduce them in sequence as the story goes deeper, not all at once at the front.

    Rules as Character

    There’s one more thing rules can do that I’ve been using more lately: they can characterize the community that made them.

    A community that has a rule against looking at the lights implies a community that believes the lights are watching back. A community that has a rule against naming certain things implies a community that believes names have power. A community that has a rule about the spring water in May implies a community that keeps records, that noticed a pattern, that did the work of encoding the survival knowledge in transmissible form.

    The rules, read carefully, tell you who these people were. What they feared and what they took seriously and what they refused to let die.

    That’s the part that keeps me coming back to this structure. The rules are a horror device. But they’re also a portrait.

    “Rabbit Season” is available now — find it on Amazon as part of There Be Monsters. More folk horror fiction coming soon.

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  • What Visiting Haunted Places Actually Feels Like

    What Visiting Haunted Places Actually Feels Like

    My partner and I have a tradition when we travel. Before we book anything, we look up what died there.

    Not morbidly — or not only morbidly. It’s more that the historical weight of a place interests us, and that weight is usually attached to the bad things. The flood. The fire. The crime that nobody quite got to the bottom of. The building that used to be something else before it was what it is now.

    We’ve done ghost tours in a dozen cities. We’ve walked through cemeteries at hours that made the groundskeepers nervous. We’ve stood in rooms where, by every account we could find, something happened that the people who lived through it couldn’t explain.

    I want to tell you what that actually feels like — not what the tour guides say it feels like, and not what the skeptics say it feels like. What it actually feels like, from someone who pays attention for a living.

    The First Thing Is the Cold

    Not in the “cold spot” paranormal sense, though those are real enough. The first cold is the one you feel before you know why.

    We were in a 19th-century hotel in Savannah — I won’t name it because Savannah has so many haunted hotels that naming one feels like endorsing a TripAdvisor entry — when I walked into a hallway on the third floor and stopped. My partner, two steps behind me, also stopped.

    Neither of us said anything for a moment. Then she said, “Do you feel that?”

    I did. Something in the air pressure, maybe. Something in the way the light behaved. There was no visible reason for either of us to stop.

    The room at the end of that hallway, we found out later, was the one.

    I’m not making a supernatural claim. I’m making an observation: human beings have threat-detection systems that are very old and often accurate, and old buildings that held bad events have a way of triggering them in people who aren’t defended against them. Whether that’s atmospheric or architectural or something genuinely paranormal is a question I don’t have a confident answer to.

    What I do have is the memory of stopping in that hallway.

    What the Tour Guides Know

    Ghost tour guides are, almost universally, the most interesting people in any city.

    They are amateur historians who became professional storytellers through necessity — nobody hires you to just stand on a street corner and recite municipal history. You need the ghost. But to get the ghost right, you have to get the history right. The haunting is the hook; the history is the substance. The best guides understand that the history is scarier than the ghost.

    The guide who walked us through a preserved antebellum district in South Carolina didn’t dwell on the apparition sightings. She spent forty minutes on the documented history — the people who died there, the records that survive, the gap between what the official accounts say and what the oral tradition preserved. By the time she got to the story of what people claimed to see in the third-floor window, she didn’t need to sell it.

    The thing had weight.

    What the Skeptics Get Half Right

    Skeptics are correct that most people on ghost tours experience what they came expecting to experience. Priming is real. If you tell someone a room is haunted and then dim the lights, you will generate phenomenological reports of haunting. This is not controversial.

    What the pure debunking stance misses is that “you experienced what you came expecting to experience” doesn’t fully explain every account, and it doesn’t explain why the content of those accounts is so consistent across time, culture, and witness.

    If a room has been generating reports of a woman in gray standing in the corner for one hundred and fifty years — reports from people who didn’t know each other, who visited in different eras, who described the same gray woman in the same corner — pure priming doesn’t actually account for that. Priming explains individual suggestibility. It doesn’t explain the anchor.

    I hold these things loosely. I am not a true believer. But I am also not someone who finds pure materialism a satisfying explanation for everything I’ve personally stood in front of.

    Why We Keep Going

    The honest answer is that visiting these places is a form of paying attention to the dead.

    History has a way of becoming abstract — names and dates and events compressed into summaries that carry no weight. Standing in the room where something happened does something that reading about it does not. The scale comes back. The reality of it.

    I write horror about places. The specific texture of a room, a hallway, a ridge at dusk. I can’t generate that texture from research alone. I need to stand somewhere and let it do what it does.

    My partner comes because she finds history genuinely moving, and because she has, on two occasions, experienced things she hasn’t found a satisfying explanation for. She isn’t frightened by those experiences. She finds them interesting. It’s one of the things I like most about her.

    The cold in the hallway. The woman in gray. The man on the ghost tour who looked at you like you’d asked about roads.

    These are not the same kind of evidence. But they’re all evidence of something. The places hold what happened in them, one way or another.

    I’d rather go look than not.

    Writing about haunted places and folk horror — join the Grimbard list for creature features, dark tourism notes, and new fiction: Join the Grimbard list